im to impose any limitations on this
almighty power, when he asked himself whether it would be possible for this
almighty power, if it so willed, to endow matter with the faculty of
thinking, he argued that it might be possible, notwithstanding his being
unable to conceive the possibility. But when he banished from his mind the
idea of this personal and almighty power, and with that idea banished all
its associations, he then felt that he had a right to argue more freely,
and forthwith made his conceptive faculty a test of abstract possibility.
Yet _the sum total of abstract possibility, in relation to him, must have
been the same in the two cases_; so that in whichever of the two trains of
reasoning his argument was sound, in the other it must certainly have been
null.

We may well feel amazed that so able a thinker can have fallen into so
obvious an error, and afterwards have persisted in it through pages and
pages of his work. It will be instructive, however, to those who rely upon
Locke's exposition of the argument from Inconceivability to see how
effectually he has himself destroyed it. For this purpose, therefore, I
shall make some further quotations from the same train of reasoning. The
statement of Locke's opinion that the Almighty could endow matter with the
faculty of thinking if He so willed, called down some remonstrances and
rebukes from the then Bishop of Worcester. Locke's reply was a very lengthy
one, and from it the following extracts are taken. I merely request the
reader throughout to substitute for the words God, Creator, Almighty,
Omipotency, &c., the words _Summum genus_ of Possibility.

"But it is further urged that we cannot conceive how matter can think. I
grant it, but to argue from thence that God therefore cannot give to matter
a faculty of thinking is to say God's omnipotency is limited to a narrow
compass because man's understanding is so, and brings down God's infinite
power to the size of our capacities....

"If God can give no power to any parts of matter but what men can account
for from the essence of matter in general; if all such qualities and
properties must destroy the essence, or change the essential properties of
matter, which are to our conceptions above it, and we cannot conceive to be
the natural consequence of that essence; it is plain that the essence of
matter is destroyed, and its essential properties changed, in most of the
sensible parts of this our system. For it is vi